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Friday, September 18, 2015

‘There should be no borders’

Economist Amiya
Kumar Bagchi speaks in an interview with Vikalp team member Suchetana Chattopadhyay.

Interview
date: 8 September 2015

Time:
7.30 PM

Place: Kolkata

SC:
Professor Bagchi, could you please tell us about the social and intellectual
climate which prompted your turn to Marxist political-economy?

AKB: It is difficult to answer this question
fully. I first became an atheist at the age of fifteen or so while studying at
Ramkrishna Bidyamandir at Belur. A very good teacher taught us religion in the
manner of Christian theology. After this, I lost whatever faith I had in God.
The Belur Math authorities allowed me to use the excellent library, with an
impressive collection of books. From there, I borrowed Communist Manifesto and
Capital Volume I. I then came to
Presidency College. Gradually, I became convinced that in order to understand
the society of our country, I have to study economics. I studied science at the
intermediate level and changed stream when I obtained admission in the Economics
honors course. At that time it was called Honours in ‘Economics and Political Science’. My general
perspective on the world became more and more Marxist as an undergraduate.
Though none of my teachers were Marxists, they exerted a different kind of
influence. They encouraged dissent among students. I wrote an essay challenging
the idea that a multi-party system of government was the best under all
circumstances. Professor U. N. Ghoshal, a Roman Catholic convert and then Head
of the Department, positively encouraged me!

Some
unconscious influence of senior students, perhaps, also moved me towards the Left.
The most famous students senior to us, Amartya Sen, Sukhamoy Chakraborty and
Partha Sarathi Gupta were active supporters of the Students Federation, the
student front of the undivided Communist Party of India.

SC:
Please tell us about your early research and work-related experiences.

AKB:
One of the problems that puzzled me was why industrial investment in India,
particularly by Indian capitalists, was so sluggish under British rule. I found
that economic historians did not even ask this question. My thesis was on
private investment in India during the first two plan periods. I never
published it because I thought it was badly structured.

The
question that I raised on industry and Indian capitalists had been bothering me
when I returned to India. Again, one of my teachers, Professor Tapas Mazumdar,
played a positive role in this. He knew that I was troubled by not having the
time or resources to work on what I wanted to do. One day, he showed me an
advertisement in The Economist. The Faculty of Economics and Politics,
Cambridge University, had invited application from people who could teach the
economics of developing countries. I wrote a letter to my first thesis
supervisor. He was then the Secretary, Faculty of Economics and Politics. I got
the job. My other (and main) supervisor, Richard Goodwin was a communist. He
became a wonderful friend for both me and my family throughout his life but I
don’t think I was directly influenced by him.

The
most powerful intellectual I have come across was Piero Sraffa. He was most
definitely a communist and a close friend of Antonio Gramsci. He influenced
Wittgenstein powerfully. He showed me the uselessness of obtaining quick fame
by writing a commentary on an economist who was not of the very first rank. The
second person who may have influenced me was Moses Finley, a communist denied
employment in the United States for his convictions. With him, I discussed the
lack of a proper method in the way economics and political science were taught in the universities at the time.

SC:
How did you begin working on the history of the State Bank of India?

AKB:
The work on the State Bank came to me through my teacher, Professor Bhabatosh
Datta. Dhruba Narayan Ghosh was then working in the Department of Economic
Affairs, Government of India. When Ghosh came to consult him about a person who
could take on the task, Professor Datta mentioned my name. I think he may have
also added, from his experience, as a
member of the first committee formed to write the history of the Reserve Bank
of India, that no committee should monitor my work. The first history of the
Reserve Bank had been turned into a hagiography of Chintamani Deshmukh, the
first Indian governor of the bank. I also would not have accepted a committee
looking over my shoulder. I also made it a condition that if the State Bank did
not like what I wrote and refused to publish I, I would accept that. But I could not be compelled to write
something I did not agree with. On the whole, the SBI kept to that condition.
R. K. Talwar, the SBI Chairman under whom the contract was made and a later Chairman, P. C. D Nambiar, were
very supportive. I wanted to write the bank’s history in the backdrop of
society and politics in India and not just as a business history. The work took
a long time since many of the documents had vanished. The first consultants
they had appointed had failed to do the work. A great deal of time was required
to search the archives, read census and other reports, to understand banking
procedures, including the ways in which the Bank of Calcutta, the Bank of
Bengal, the Bank of Bombay and the Bank of Madras operated in the Indian money
market and how the money market itself worked.

The
late Tarapada Santra, who travelled from one village to another on foot to
collect material on folk culture of Bengal, paid me a complement when we met for
the first and last time. He told me that before reading
my work he had not realised that there was so much social history behind the
history of banking.

In
the early 1990s, I had a fight with the SBI Chairman and managing directors.
They did not want such an elaborate history. I may say, parenthetically, that
all of them lost their jobs by becoming involved in the housing corporation
scam. P. G. Kakodkar, who then became the Chairman, was extremely supportive of
detailed scholarship. During his chairmanship, an official decision was made to
open a separate SBI Archives in Calcutta. It is now located at Samriddhi
Bhavan, Strand Road where the Imperial Bank of India used to be located.

SC: What are your current engagements?

AKB: It was while working on the colonial economy
that I realised India underwent major famines during the First World War. These
were generally brushed aside as ‘scarcity’.
I wrote about this in the Social
Scientist last year. This requires intensive archival work. I can’t do this
any more. I hope others will take it up.

Among
my many current assignments, a work which I really must do is being delayed. I
signed an agreement with Pluto Press to write a book on democracy. I must finish
this work. I wish to compare democracy in Athens with the models prevalent in
the US and in India. To this I hope to add the experiments taking place in
Latin America. Aristotle provided the templates which people still use. This
will not be an easy job.

SC: A related question: what is your
reading of the current world situation?

AKB: As far as the subcontinent is concerned, my
long-term projection is that there should be no borders. Partition has
immensely harmed this region. We should have a people’s union. As for the
current refugee crisis in Europe, the Mediterranean and West Asia, it is the US
Government and its NATO allies who are responsible for so much misery and
dislocation. Desperate people are pouring into Hungary, Austria and Germany. I don’t think the imperial powers
will draw any lesson from this. I had earlier thought that China will act as a
bulwark against US imperialism. The Chinese economy is doing very badly, much
worse than expected. They are reaping the consequences of allowing Stock
Markets to operate. They have huge reserves but in the course of the last two
weeks they have lost billions of dollars. Managing capitalism under the aegis
of a communist party has proved to be a tricky affair. Though Maoists don’t
read him, we have to draw lessons from the works of Mao Tse Tung along with
Lenin and of course, Marx.

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How do we see the world? It is neither a gaze, nor is it to invent the predetermined truth, it is to intervene from a position. Our seeing is changing at the same time and without any claim to excavate the unadulterated truth that never existed.
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